Different Beasts

by J. R. McConvey

  On the morning of the show, the sun rose into grey clouds and there was a kind of cool, invisible fog in the air, which kept people away for most of the morning, save a few joggers. I’d had vodka to drink the night before, half an old bottle I’d found discarded under the Gardiner, so I slept until Felix’s nudging and whimpering got me up. We ambled across Cherry and up Unwin, and there it was again — the Hearn, in all its monumental disuse. Except, even from the distance, I could see the banner draped from the seven-hundred-foot-tall smokestack announcing the arrival of LUMINATO. A fleet of white trailer trucks filled the parking lot. People scurried like bugs around the huge cave of an entrance. We crossed the building’s main drive and kept going up Unwin, past the stack, to where you could find access points, maybe an entrance that wasn’t guarded, a flimsy barrier to climb underneath. We cased the whole place, going round back to the patchy gravel above the channel side. I found a few potential spots.

  It was around then that I realized I’d have to find somewhere to put Felix. Sneaking in solo was one thing; a big shepherdlike mutt wouldn’t go unnoticed, even one as skin-and-bones as Felix. It was a tricky proposition. I could try and find someone to look after him, but it was getting late in the afternoon. I wanted another nap before the show, and whoever I asked would want something in return. Besides, it was the Port Lands. A forgotten zone. I figured he’d be fine, that he could sleep for a few hours and chew on a stick or two while I watched the show. I found a stand of trees where I could stash him, past the Hearn’s driveway but not quite into Tommy Thompson Park. I settled in for a bite of jerky, a smoke or two and some sleep, with Felix’s paws and chin perched on my knees.

  When I woke up, it was almost dark — past eight o’clock. I scratched Felix’s ears, found a couple good branches for him to gnaw on, put down an old Tupperware container full of water from my canteen, and tied him tight around the base of a big maple. I told him to stay put. I thought, again, No one will come out this way.

  That night was an exception, though. Turning up Unwin after I left Felix was like walking into a parallel dimension. People streamed up the usually empty road, all kinds — lots of bearded guys in plaid shirts, as you’d expect, but also a different kind of art crowd, people in suits and dresses of bright colours. They had shuttles running, big ghost-lit beetles creaking up the pitted road. Spotlights scanned the sky above the Hearn, white limbs reaching out into the blackness. I thought how you could probably see them from almost anywhere in the city — how Luminato had invited all of Toronto to come down for their drone metal art show, where the biggest freak attraction was the building itself, as though it had suddenly just appeared a few weeks ago and hadn’t been sitting there, dormant, for twenty years, with rats like me haunting its corridors. The night was cool but humid. The smells of perfume and beer mingled with the usual reek of coal tar and tinny water. I had on my big canvas coat and my Jays cap. Around that time, panhandling with a Jays cap could easily win you an extra ten to twelve bucks a day, especially if you were willing to go far enough along the waterfront that you got close to the stadium and hit up people on their way to a game. I figured the cap might help if I got caught sneaking into the Hearn.

  As it turns out, I didn’t have to worry. I’d planned to get in through a loose panel on the north side, but when I reached the main drive I realized it would be way simpler than that. A huge crowd was funnelling its way into the building like a crawling worm. At a glance, it was plain that the organizers had underestimated the Hearn and had no idea how to control the crowd. People were pushing through, past guards with little electronic scanners who looked completely bewildered. All I had to do was move with the mass. No one said a word; I slipped through on the current.

  The building was familiar to me, but that night it felt hallucinatory, like I’d taken some crazy acid. Everything was lit in purples and blues. Art stations were set up in corners decked in foil and wire, with screens hung at odd angles, showing footage in grainy black and white. The sound in the building was immense, even with no music playing. The murmuring of all the people in the crowd rose up to the rafters and flapped up there like flocks of trapped birds. I waded through it, mute, amazed, as always, at how normal people live their normal lives, with their soft wallets and polished glasses and clean teeth. I followed the crowd to the main hall, where the stage was built in the middle of the sprawling concrete floor, flanked by steel pillars that rose up into the shadowed web of the ceiling. Hands in pockets, I stood and waited, hoping someone might hand me a joint before the show.

  Even now, knowing how the night ended, I sometimes remember the power of the music, and think how it was almost worth it. As soon as the first crushing notes came out of the speakers, feedback squeal and deafening bass like a goddamn tanker smashing into a pier, plumes of thick smoke started spewing out from the stage. The sound kept getting louder, the smoke thicker, the purple lights deeper and more intense. I’ve tried lots of drugs, nearly everything you could name — Oxy, crack, coke, heroin, K, meth, morphine, a litre of cough syrup with another of overproof rum — and it was like that, Sunn O))): that feeling of being taken away by something, of being lifted with soft hands into an unknown space. In the feral rumbling of their guitars, my body went numb. At the height of the show, when there was a guy stalking the stage, wearing a horned mask and a cape made of broken mirror shards, holding aloft a light that shone like a fission rod clenched in his fist, I looked up and watched flakes of old paint and rusted metal rain down on the crowd, shimmering crystals of an exploded past, drifting in the purple light. I would have sworn my feet weren’t on the ground, that I was ascending; the sound they were making was so brutal that it was holy. I cried that night. Not like I sometimes do — because of cold or hunger or loneliness — but for how beautiful it all was, this city that hated me, that was both the broken place I lived in and the emerald city that all the lucky people never had to leave. Those tears were the best kind of emptying. I left before the show was over, tenderized, hoping to slip out before the lights came on and the spell wore off, before the crowds got thick and we’d all have to stagger back out into the air in a dirty human sluice. I wanted to maintain the feeling of floating lightness as long as I could, stay immaterial, dissolved by Sunn O)))’s pulverizing tones.

  I don’t remember the minutes walking up Unwin, with the Hearn looming behind me, the band’s noise bleeding out into the night. I like to pretend they were blissful. That I spent them looking up at the sky, feeling the damp mist settle on my face like the fallen skin of a nighttime cloud, Sunn O)))’s vibrations flowing through me like a spirit of primeval mercy. I like to imagine I couldn’t help smiling — me, third-generation Cherry Street filth — all the way over the scrub grass and into the trees, until I walked into the thicket and saw what the demons were doing to Felix.

  I don’t know who they were — who would have the gall to wander off from a damn art party into the bush, to let their sickness loose. I know they weren’t my people. Their clothes were clean, black, without the ingrained dust you see on us who sleep outside most nights. Their hair had product in it. They wore polished shoes. They probably passed for respectable taxpayers out there in the daytime city, even though they’d found some reason to leave the show and come out into a dark patch of the Port Lands, where they’d found my dog and decided to see how far up his ass they could push a splintered fence picket, while one of them held him in a chokehold and clamped his muzzle shut with a piece of wire, to keep him from tearing out their throats.

  Coming on it, I could see the aura around them. The haze. First, it was money: a sickly yellow-green mist. Then it was hate, the cool poisonous gas of the comfortable. Then I recognized it for what it really was: too much fancy vodka, one too many designer pills. Playing at debasement, a night in the wild. These people, who had no idea what it meant to be outside — to be reduced, to do things you’d have once called unspeakable because if you don’t, you’ll die freezing in a parking lot — these people were violatin
g Felix for fun. I can still feel how seeing the wire cut into his snout sent a sharp pain curling around my own neck, how seeing them jam the sharp picket up his asshole while his whole body quaked and he spat out little foamy shrieks made my guts knot up and sent a hot wetness like gushing blood into my bowels.

  When I was young, my grandfather would tell me, sometimes, about the war. He told me about crawling through mud, being a human beetle, his job to find and defuse mines, or trigger them in trying. He told me about watching friends get their heads blown off by bullets he’d felt pass inches from his ear. He told me about hiding inside gutted-out cows while mortar shells popped into the dirt around him, sending up sprays of flesh and earth and metal. My grandfather drank Black Label, hit his wife, terrified his daughter. When he got to the part about the streetcar going sideways down Cherry Street, we would all laugh.

  There was a rock at my feet and I picked it up, took three big steps and drove it hard into the temple of the guy holding the picket. He never even saw me — just slumped to the ground like a bag of dirt, the picket sliding out of Felix as he went. His buddy saw me, though. He dropped Felix’s head — my dog falling limp to the ground, shaking, blood pooling around his haunches — and stood back. He couldn’t figure it out, for a second. I guess he was trying to work out what it meant to be caught, and who had caught him.

  Once he realized, he backed away a few steps. But he didn’t run. He looked right at me, staring at my face for what seemed like a long time. I wanted to think he was petrified, afraid to move in case I ran at him with the rock, screaming a warrior cry. I was all shaky myself, though, breathing weird, spittle at the corners of my mouth. Everything in me was screaming, but my voice was too locked in rage and disbelief to work, too aware of the only way this could possibly go. Because here’s what was really happening: he was remembering me. Taking note of my face, so he could give an accurate description to the cops. The spell held for seconds — me breathing in grunts, Felix wheezing, and this guy just studying me, almost sneering — until his friend moaned and coughed on the ground, and my muscles sprung, the tension uncoiling in a wide arc as I brought the stone down onto the fallen man’s temple again, then swung it around and jammed it into his teeth, one, two, three times, the cracking getting more damp and hollow with each blow, leaving a ragged bloody chasm where his mouth had been. When I looked up again, wet warmth soaking my arm, the other guy was gone, torn off through the bush, probably already pulling out his iPhone to call 911 and tell them a homeless vagrant was trying to murder his friend.

  The picket man had gone still on the ground, so I picked up Felix. He was heavy and light at the same time, and he shook like there were wires pumping volts into his pink belly. I ran with him in my arms, sweating in my canvas coat, up Unwin and toward the spit, out past the marina and into Tommy Thompson Park, boots hammering on the gravel like stone clubs, Felix’s limp legs jiggling with each step. My chest was burning so bad in the damp air I thought I might have a stroke, but I didn’t stop until I got out to the ragged tip of the Leslie Spit, where it’s all stone and fern and prickly scrub and garbage, residue of fleeting camps for people like me; birds and muskrats, lake and sky. The moon was up by then, a soft white disc in the black morning that cast a pearl sheen over the skyline. The CN Tower blinked to the west, above the dark mass of Ward’s Island.

  Right across the outer harbour, also blinking, was the Hearn. I kept looking up at its stack, as I hunted for a soft patch of grass in which to lay Felix down, crouched by the water and cupped handfuls into an old tin mug, poured the water over my dog’s bloodied wounds and put a hand on his heaving chest, saying his name over and over and telling him it was going to be okay. I figured he’d live through it, tough old dog that he was. I looked at the Hearn and asked it, grimy alien god, to make my friend okay, to keep him alive. It answered with more blinks, flashing hiccups of white and red. I couldn’t tell if they were a message from its insect heart, blips of recognition, or signals of the new plague being born inside it, the consuming energy that would spread out from its illuminated core and erase the port I knew, bringing more festivals, more parties, more rituals of the unhungry world, casting us faded people out even further from the city to make room for monsters in designer glasses, who drink vodka Red Bulls and Bacardi with lime, escape reality when their tickets allow, and rape the odd dog for fun.

  They want to make the city all pretty and smooth, these people. They want to pretend everything is under control, that their buildings won’t come alive and consume them. That their skin will keep their corruption contained. But I know there will always be wild places, cracks where things get through, spots that get forgotten, where aberrations go to thrive.

  Felix died two days later. I wanted to take him to the vet, but I had no money, couldn’t collect nearly enough, even with a tear-stained face and a bloody dog dying on my lap. For some reason, watching Felix finally stop breathing was what got me remembering my grandfather’s streetcar story again. I keep thinking how, when I was a kid, the story seemed to have happened so far in the past, in a different place, a different world — but how, actually, it’s still happening now. How, in my grandfather’s city, the streets have all the same names as the ones I know and live on. How the Hearn lived out its whole cycle of use in the time between my grandfather’s childhood and mine. How there was a streetcar here, in his day, where there isn’t one now.

  Some people have tried to tell me there never was a streetcar on Cherry. That my grandfather must have been wrong, or just made it up. I tell them I remember how it went. The streetcar goes sideways down Cherry Street.

  I keep waiting for it to appear, that streetcar. Thinking that one day soon, I’ll be walking along the pier and it’ll screech over the Don, going sideways, and barrel down the road, translucent as a ghost, slicing through buildings like projected light, until it gets to me and I feel myself sink into its ghostliness and become inseparable from it. How I’ll find my grandfather inside, smiling — and maybe the angel, Luminato, and my dead dog, too.

  Across

  Agnes stood on the tarmac, staring at the mouth of the Rainbow Bridge. Customs gates cut across it like the teeth of a shredder. The car idled beside her, pushing more heat into the already scorching day. In the distance, the falls roared, as always. Across the border, stateside, the fibreglass curve of the Waterdome peeked out from behind the bridge’s towers, swollen and blue, a bulbous wave. In the belly of that dome, you could get right up under Niagara Falls — it was the only way, now — but first, you had to get across.

  On this side was Clifton Hill, ice cream, peppermint fudge, french fries and ketchup, clowns and balloons and haunted houses. The best view of the real-life roaring water. But no futuristic Waterdome — no Immersive 360° Journey Under the Falls — which was all Callum wanted. His fevered request.

  And she had to tell him: they couldn’t get across.

  He was in the back seat, smacking his sweaty calves against the fake leather. Looking out at her, looking at the bridge.

  “Mommy?”

  She had to tell him.

  Callum had gotten the fever four nights ago, shivering under a teal polyester blanket in their cramped, un-air-conditioned apartment at the edge of Welland. She’d brought him into her bed — a habit that’d stuck, with just the two of them, even though he’d be turning eight this year. It was the heat radiating off him that made her slip. There was no knowing worry like that until you’d slept in it, cooking in it, yellow with it. Callum had looked like a child of three again, his eyes wide, his barely muscled chest puffing like the crop of a mute bird. He was so weak, half-delirious, this kid who was all hers — her one blond grace in a life spent courting losers, running into police caravans and ending up alone in a grey cell with only the surveillance cameras to talk to, and alone again after that.

  For feverish Callum, her lone angel, burning alive? She would’ve said anything.

  When he’d muttered about the Waterdome — how cool it was, h
ow badly he wanted to see it, his temperature dropping by a few degrees with just a mention — it seemed like a divine solution. Of course, angel. We’ll go see the dome. Anything you want.

  She hadn’t thought for a second about the border. Her record. Barriers laid in the past.

  She’s ready to fly. One kilo strapped to her back under chute and another tucked between her breasts, zipped into her jumpsuit. The Cessna’s propellers give off a deafening whine. From up front, Glen, headphones on over a battered Bills cap, throws her a big thumbs-up.

  She looks out the hatch and thinks how she’s never seen skies so blue. The clouds curl into charging buffaloes of white mist below her. She can feel the power of the engines running through her hips, vibrating in the straps against her shoulders. The jump is no different than hundreds she’s done before. It’s like a tandem, but with bundles of kush strapped to you instead of a human being. The contact is waiting in the field below. The only risk is on me, she thinks, and steps out of the plane . . .

  She drifts down, warm air wafting up under her purple chute, thinking how the cars down there look like insects, tiny black-and-white things in formation. The sirens flare on, wailing shocks of red and blue. A muffled voice erupts from a bullhorn. She’s headed straight for the middle of it all. As she falls, she thinks how there can never be enough light in the sky to make you invisible . . .

  When she told him, Callum’s wail blended in with the roar of the falls, gave off mist like the plunging water. It was the kind of moment that he would always bear, her confession lodged in his memory like a splinter: the day Callum Davies knew his mother for a liar and a crook.

  Afterward, with Callum still howling in the back seat, she’d driven south along the Niagara Parkway, past the falls. On the boardwalk, where the boats had once departed for rides into the mist, a cluster of demonstrators held poster boards and chanted slogans lamenting the swollen river. They were a permanent fixture now. And they were right: the water was rising. Volume had increased. Flow was unpredictable. Shutting down the tour boats wasn’t the half of it: four people had been swept away already, three tourists and a sanitation worker. More would surely die. But Agnes didn’t know who these people were chanting at. The government? The falls? It roared back; it would consume them all. No wonder the New York tourist board had built the sleek dome theatre to replace the tour boats, and relentlessly advertised it to the kids of the Golden Horseshoe as a marvel of advanced cinematic technology, a safe and novel way to see the wonder of the great cataract. It was immaterial, empty, a pristine projection devoid of the true power of the water; but no one would die from it.